What if mobile, self-sufficient living units were the building blocks for future cities? In a time when growing urban populations are faced with environmental, political, and economic instability, and when human and societal dislocation and relocation increasingly erode stable notions of dwelling, Eyebeam Fellow Mary Mattingly’s Flock House project represents a group of migratory, sculptural [...]

**Distributed Citizen Sensing Diagram – Imagine distributed air quality sensors throughout NYC. RECAP: On December 2nd, 2011, I attended the NYC Open Sensor Network Workshop at Eyebeam. We focused on distributed citizen sensing of air quality. What are the challenges, limitations and possibilities of a distributed sensor network? The workshop began with an introduction to relevant [...]

Activist Technology Demo Day Saturday, January 28 3-6pm Eyebeam Art + Technology Center From Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, technology has played an important role in shaping contemporary resistance and the representation of these events in the media. What new tools of protest and occupation have emerged over the past year? The Urban Research Group @ [...]

Occu-bot and Management-bot Taeyoon Choi 12/25/2011 Occu-bot is a D.I.Y robot for occupation and picket holding. Management-bot (also known as the Financier) is a walking bot that accompanies the Occubot. Barking-bot is a megaphone-dog that confronts the Occubot and protects the Management-bot. A note from 9/27/2011 Yesterday I went down to the Wall street occupation in [...]

The Sentient City Survival Kit is a design research project that explores the social, cultural and political implications of ubiquitous computing for urban environments. It takes as its method the design, fabrication and presentation of a collection of artifacts, spaces and media for survival in the near-future sentient city. As computing leaves the desktop and [...]

What if mobile, self-sufficient living units were the building blocks for future cities? In a time when growing urban populations are faced with environmental, political, and economic instability, and when dislocation and relocation is important to consider and reconcile, Flock House represents a group of migratory, sculptural living systems built collaboratively from reclaimed materials to merge with preexisting urban [...]

Kicking off a series of public events this spring organized by the Urban Research Group, Drew Hemment delivered a talk on FutureEverything’s Open Data Cities Lab and DataGM – the Greater Manchester Datastore, a partnership between FutureEverything and Trafford Council in Greater Manchester. Open Data plays a critical role in making cities and their current [...]

Where’s the data? Technology has progressed to the point that we as citizens with concerns or interests can leverage open source hardware and software together with cloud platforms like Pachube to quickly and cheaply build the systems we need to get the data we want. It’s time we put theory into practice and come together [...]

Contemporary urban space poses new challenges and opportunities for urban life as traditional lines between public and private become increasingly entangled in both liberatory and contested ways. How these spaces are planned and occupied, who regulates the actions and events that transpire there, and what constitutes the terms by which civic participation in these processes [...]